Archive for May 21, 2010

My dream is to go to China (and Vietnam and Japan and Thailand) and to eat my way across the country, but this is giving me second thoughts. It’s also giving me second thoughts about how we treat animals. Ugh.

The news here in the U.S. is so bad it makes me want to take my head off and set it down, but it’s my duty as a citizen of the world to put it back on for a second and take this in:

A US appeals court has refused to give prisoners at an American military base in Afghanistan the same legal right to challenge their imprisonment as detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

The three-judge panel on Friday sided with the Obama administration, ruling that US courts do not have jurisdiction over the legal petitions by the prisoners at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and ordered that their cases be dismissed.

The administration Barack Obama, the US president, took the same legal position as the administration of his predecessor, George Bush, arguing that detainees at Bagram have no right to have their cases heard in federal court in Washington.

US District Judge John Bates last year rejected that argument and ruled three detainees at Bagram who sued the US government could proceed with their bid to win their freedom.

But the appeals court reversed his ruling in a unanimous decision.

When I was a kid, a U.S. military base was thought of as sacrosanct — as sacrosanct as U.S. soil. Prisoners held at those bases were given the same rights as prisoners held in U.S. because, essentially, they entered the U.S. when they entered the base.

I remember being so proud of that — so proud we treated prisoners well — that they were read their rights and they had access to lawyers and trials. I thought that was what our country was about — the right to be presented with charges, to face an accuser and to have a trial by a jury your peers. You know, law and order.

Alas, not anymore. Now we have gulags where prisoners will potentially languish forever.

Could there be any clearer evidence that there is no such thing as the “liberal media?” Why isn’t Jack Conway, Rand Paul’s Democratic opponent, the talk of the town instead of Paul? Heck, I had no idea what the guy looked like, what his voice sounded like or what his views were until I saw this.

There are a whole lotta situations where if Rand Paul has to describe his beliefs in detail, his beliefs are gonna sound really weird and alienating. And I think Rand Paul knows that and that’s why he’s trying so hard not to describe his own beliefs in plain English. And that is the part that really bothers me. It’s not even the ideological stuff so much as the craven, weasely, insulting-our-intelligence, non-answer-giving, cynical, political hackiness of that performance. It’s that this candidate who’s supposed to be the alternative to politics as usual, when push comes to shove, would rather give the same ol’ weasely, political non-answers than show the courage of his convictions and speak from the heart about his weird, alienating beliefs.

UPDATE: Paul did indeed pull out of the MTP interview, one of only three “major candidates” to do so in the 63-year history of the show, according to Keith Olbermann.

I’m reading on Twitter that Rand Paul is trying to cancel a scheduled appearance on Sunday’s Meet the Press. So, have his handlers told him to stay away from all the outlets other than Fox (where he’ll get softball questions)? Is he actually afraid of beltway boy David Gregory, who kisses politicians’ ass as well as anyone? Is he so incapable of handling himself in public that hiding out is preferable? Or, is he such a wingnut radical that he doesn’t want anyone to know what he really thinks?